Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Emotions ran high at this week’s Privacy Identity and Innovation conference in Seattle. They usually do when the topic of privacy and technology is raised, and to me that was the real take-away from the event.
As expected, the organizers did an excellent job providing attendees with provocative panels, presentations and keynotes talks—in particular an excellent presentation from my former UC Berkeley colleague Marc Davis, who has just joined Microsoft.
The Progress and Freedom Foundation has just published a white paper I wrote for them titled “The Seven Deadly Sins of Title II Reclassification (NOI Remix).” This is an expanded and revised version of an earlier blog post that looks deeply into the FCC’s pending Notice of Inquiry regarding broadband Internet access. You can download a PDF here.
I point out that beyond the danger of subjecting broadband Internet to extensive new regulations under the so-called “Third Way” approach outlined by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a number of other troubling features in the Notice indicate an even broader agenda for the agency with regard to the Internet. Continue reading →
I dashed off a piece for CNET today on the Copyright Office’s cell phone “jailbreaking” rulemaking earlier this week. Though there has already been extensive coverage (including solid pieces in The Washington Post, a New York Times editorial, CNET, and Techdirt), there were a few interesting aspects to the decision I thought were worth highlighting.
Most notably, I was interested that no one had discussed the possibility and process by which Apple or other service providers could appeal the rulemaking. Ordinarily, parties who object to rules enrolled by administrative agencies can file suit in federal district court under the Administrative Procedures Act. Such suits are difficult to win, as courts give deference to administrative determinations and review them only for errors of law. But a win for the agency is by no means guaranteed. Continue reading →
The White House and the Federal Communications Commission have painted themselves into a very tight and very dangerous corner on Net Neutrality. To date, a bi-partisan majority of Congress, labor leaders, consumer groups and, increasingly, some of the initial advocates of open Internet rules are all shouting that the agency has gone off the rails in its increasingly Ahab-like pursuit of an obscure and academic policy objective.
Now comes further evidence, none of it surprising, that all this effort has been a fool’s errand from the start. Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica is reporting today on a new study from Australia’s University of Ballarat that suggests only .3% of file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol is something other than the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works. Which is to say that 99.7% of the traffic they sampled is illegal. The Australian study, as Cheng notes, supports similar conclusions of a Princeton University study published earlier this year
If I ever had any hope of “keeping up” with developments in the regulation of information technology—or even the nine specific areas I explored in The Laws of Disruption—that hope was lost long ago. The last few months I haven’t even been able to keep up just sorting the piles of printouts of stories I’ve “clipped” from just a few key sources, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNET News.com and The Washington Post.
I’ve just gone through a big pile of clippings that cover April-July. A few highlights: In May, YouTube surpassed 2 billion daily hits. Today, Facebook announced it has more than 500,000,000 members. Researchers last week demonstrated technology that draws device power from radio waves.
Better late than never, I’ve finally given a close read to the Notice of Inquiry issued by the FCC on June 17th. (See my earlier comments, “FCC Votes for Reclassification, Dog Bites Man”.) In some sense there was no surprise to the contents; the Commission’s legal counsel and Chairman Julius Genachowski had both published comments over a month before the NOI that laid out the regulatory scheme the Commission now has in mind for broadband Internet access.
Chairman Genachowski’s “Third Way” comments proposed an option that he hoped would satisfy both extremes. The FCC would abandon efforts to find new ways to meet its regulatory goals using “ancillary jurisdiction” under Title I (an avenue the D.C. Circuit had wounded, but hadn’t actually exterminated, in the Comcast decision), but at the same time would not go as far as some advocates urged and put broadband Internet completely under the telephone rules of Title II.
I dashed off a quick analysis of the Bilski decision for CNET yesterday (see “Supreme Court Hedges on Business Method Patents”), a follow-up to a piece I wrote for The Big Money when the case was argued last fall. (See “Not with my Digital Economy, You Don’t.”)
The decision was a surprise for me. I had fully expected the Court to reject outright the experiment in granting patents to paper-and-pencil business methods launched by the Federal Circuit in 1998 with the State Street decision. Especially since the Federal Circuit itself, in its rejection of Bilski’s application, had all but dismissed State Street as the disaster most businesses—even businesses who have benefited from business method patents–know it to be.
Toy Story 3 offers many pleasures and not a little wisdom. I absorbed them with a shocking output of tears, both the laughing kind and otherwise. At one point, too, I raised my fist in solidarity, moved by the political philosophy voiced by Barbie (brilliantly played by Barbie). I liked Barbie’s quote so much that I put it on a t-shirt:
Nice, huh? Click on the picture to customize the shirt for your build and style.
I’m late to the party, but I wanted to say a few things about the District Court’s decision in the Viacom v. YouTube case this week and. This will be a four-part post, covering:
1. The holding
2. The economic principle behind it
3. The next steps in the case
4. A review of the errors in legal analysis and procedure committed by reporters covering the case
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
